Gerard Manley Hopkins embraced Roman Catholic sacramental theology. Grace, which creates recipients anew in their deepest selves, may be offered within sacraments or outside of them. A valid sacrament establishes a formal relationship; this ‘thing-which-is-also-a-sign’ distinguishes sacraments from other sources of grace. The words consecrating the Eucharist, Hopkins believed, literally embody Christ upon the altar – unlike poems. Sacraments require physical, not merely intellectual elements. Poems are more like ‘sacramentals’, which do not establish a reality without intellectual recognition and willed assent. Keenly aware of the relation between nature’s physicality and the physicality of sacraments, Hopkins did not confuse natural awareness of God’s goodness with sacramental grace, and rejected pantheism. He developed his personal vision of Catholic sacraments and their relation to Nature through Tractarians like Henry Parry Liddon, as well as the aesthetics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Ruskin.

This chapter surveys the condition of Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholics in Victorian England. Special emphasis is placed on significant historical, political, aesthetic, and devotional elements of Roman Catholicism in Britain, and how these elements influenced Gerard Manley Hopkins’s life and writing. In particular, the chapter considers how Hopkins’s sacramental vision, cultivated during and following his conversion to Roman Catholicism, profoundly shaped his poetry at the levels of form, feeling, and vision. This chapter therefore examines Roman Catholicism as a transformative vision of everyday life and living, the arts, and vocation for not only Hopkins but also his contemporaries who endured, and subtly resisted if not helped to redress, the social prejudices against and legal exclusions of Roman Catholics throughout the Victorian period.

The most familiar way of conjoining religion and queerness in America is proscriptive. This is so despite the vivid presence of non-normative sexualities in the sacred stories of nearly all religions and the formative labors of queer-identified persons in their ranks. In invocations of American religion the default religion is likely to be Christian; the default Christianity, Protestant; the primary office of religion, morality; and the morality in question, sexual morality. In this way, the very category of religion in America is shaped by the pathologizing of non-normative sexualities. If to embrace queer lives is to depart from faithful Christian witness, then all departures from right religion bear the taint of suspect desire. But exile is not the only place of queerness in American religious lives, as literary history amply confirms. By what paths did early American texts come to identify religion as heteronormative? And how has a more generative religious imagination of queerness come to shape American literature? This chapter tracks these questions by moving between Puritan invocations of queerness as civic and spiritual threat and later rejoinders in American letters.

While Roman Catholicism has not traditionally figured prominently in Romantic studies, this essay traces the emerging sense of its cultural, historical, and political importance in the period. With William Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” as a case study, it outlines the political struggle over Catholic Emancipation, transnational contact with Ireland and France, anti-Catholic and philo-Catholic strands of British Romanticism, and contested religious historiographies.

Joseph Capizzi lays out Catholic just war theory and its tie to the Church’s teaching on conscience. The scriptural context for just war teaching is Jesus’ discourse in John 14, in which he promises to give peace, but not as world gives. The world’s peace is often tainted with the temptation to sacrifice neighbors and innocents. War can be an expression of conscience, but only if ordered toward peace, guided by morality, and open always to the conversion of self and neighbor. The just war approach excludes objectives such as vengeance. It prohibits direct harm to noncombatants. Both sides in a conflict are potential members of the community for whom peace is a goal. As against any duty of military service, US law currently protects the conscience of conscientious objectors (COs) who oppose all wars on the basis of religion or nonreligious morals. It does not, however, protect “selective conscientious objectors” (SCOs), those who oppose only unjust wars. Finally, consistent application of conscience protection instructs that soldiers with moral agency as rational beings with a conscience, should refuse to follow orders against their conscience and the moral law.

Christian Brugger treats a question of Catholic theology: the sensus fidei (the sense of the faith) in relation to conscience. Some theologians have claimed that when a significant number of the faithful conclude about a matter of faith or morals, they are expressing the sensus fidei, which merits recognition. Thus, such a conclusion can unfailingly inform the conscience. The sensus fidei has a long history but was noticeably used in Lumen Gentium from the Second Vatican Council. There it concerned the capacity of the baptized to know the truths of the faith, by the Holy Spirit. It is an intellectual power, however many false ideas about it followed the Council. Properly understood, the sensus fidei is inclusive of the teachings of Jesus and the Church about right and wrong. It is about the Church as a whole and is witnessed by consent of the whole Church – lay, hierarchy and religious. It can be blunted by poor liturgy and formation. It is limited to matters of faith and morals, and attendant to building up the Church. When properly exercised, it is one of the ways the Church can speak infallibly about what is to be believed.

Stravinsky’s spiritual trajectory is an essential part of his complex artistic makeup and his work cannot be understood without taking it into account. While this may initially seem paradoxical given Stravinsky’s standing as an arch-modernist, his relationship with religion, while it varied in kind over the course of his life, was extremely strong and closely interwoven with other aspects of his character, in particular his connection with the culture of his native Russia. Not that this should be unexpected. As Peter Gay has pointed out, ‘The psychological turn of a modernist towards a lost emotional home should surprise only those who equate modernism with atheism. … It does not follow, then, that Stravinsky abandoned originality while he searched, as he put it, for order.’1

Mahler’s innate spirituality, which we might read in modern terms as a tendency to be “spiritual but not religious” – has a long pedigree. Richard Wagner’s Religion und Kunst (1880) makes a distinction between inward faith, living and authentic, and outward religion, rigid and dogmatic. This contrast finds an important nexus in Austro-German lands in the latter half of the nineteenth century in three distinct areas that figured centrally in Mahler’s life: Jewish assimilation (including secularization and conversion); tendencies in Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism; and the transference or sublimation of religious experience to the arts and particularly music (Kunstreligion). A born Jew, a converted Roman Catholic, and a lifelong Wagnerian, Mahler deemphasized the role of organized religion in his personal worldview, replacing it with the religious sensibility that is captured by the Wagnerian ideal of Kunstreligion.

Recognizing the complexity, strangeness and variety of the Decadent interest in religion, this chapter asks what about religion proved so attractive. Noting some of the scholarly developments in this area since the turn of the twenty-first century, the chapter considers the limits of a secular purview and invites readers to join with the Decadents in seeking a more capacious understanding of what religious belief might entail. The work of reimagining belief has long been part of the life of faith, and the chapter explores this point by developing a theological account of desire in the work of Oscar Wilde and Michael Field. Just because the Christian faith is fluid and complex in the work of the Decadents, it does not follow that Decadence is inevitably heterodox. However, the Decadents’ interest in religion did sometimes take them beyond the Christian faith to other faith traditions and to mysticism and the occult.

This chapter investigates debates around the First Amendment in the nineteenth century. In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut that the First Amendment built “a wall of separation between Church & State.” Although not central to interpreting the First Amendment in the nineteenth century, Jefferson’s metaphor became the dominant interpretation in twentieth-century jurisprudence. This chapter examines whether citizens, public figures, and the courts endorsed a theory similar to Jefferson’s, and it finds they did not. Instead, the national practice endorsed public Christianity, building upon that faith’s majority status. At the same time, three groups posed definite challenges to this consensus. Freethinkers raised doubts about both Christianity and its socially privileged status. Roman Catholics had to defend their rights to religious practice. Mormon practice of plural marriage, however, went beyond the population’s willingness to tolerate and so was opposed by the power of the federal government.

Justice Antonin Scalia was a towering figure in jurisprudence and legal culture. Among other things, he was the most eloquent and prominent proponent of the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its “original meaning.” Scalia was also a devout Christian: a traditional Catholic who set forth his Christian beliefs with honesty, pungency, and wit. He frequently told the story how during his college oral examinations, he was asked the most significant event in history; he answered, the Battle of Waterloo, whereupon the professor “shook his head sadly and said, ‘No, Mr. Scalia. The Incarnation.’” The lesson for the young Scalia: “[Never] separate your religious life from your intellectual life.” Yet this most publicly devout justice also frequently made clear that his beliefs had nothing to do with his judicial role. His job, he emphasized, was merely to apply the meaning of the text without regard to policy considerations or moral values, including religious values. “I’m a worldly judge,” he often said. This presents a puzzle: did Scalia end up separating his religious life from his jurisprudence, the core of his intellectual life? Or was he still somehow a distinctively Christian judge? The solution, I suggest, lies in distinguishing his first-order legal conclusions, which were driven largely (although not solely) by his positivist judicial method, from his second-order choice of that method, which may well have reflected aspects of his personal outlook on the world, including his faith.